Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018
- Автор: Ловси Питер, Зельцерман Дэйв
- Год: 2018
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018». Краткое содержание книги:
Then she remembered the horror that the horror of the puke had pushed aside for only the briefest of moments: “Andrea,” she said.
The old lady was on the floor, still, near the beer cooler, behind the potato chips and candy. A bag of chips also lay still on the floor. He could tell she was dead without feeling for a pulse — he wasn’t sure exactly where you were supposed to feel for a pulse, anyhow — as her glasses were cockeyed, her eyes open. He stood chewing the back of his hand, not liking the taste of it. Monica had retreated, sitting on the top step perilously close to the puddle of puke, still shaking, rummaging through her purse. He went to her, reaching down, but she shrugged him off, still rummaging. “I can’t find my phone.” She was forever misplacing it.
“She was like that when you found her?” His mind was racing. “What happened—” He looked past the gas pumps, to the lonely wet road. “A heart attack, maybe?”
“Do you have yours?” she said, looking up at him, eyes like spotlights behind the thick lenses. “We have to call nine-one-one. We have to do something.”
Something. In a spontaneous fog of inspiration, he strode back in, around the counter, prying open the cash drawer with his pocketknife. Stuffing a fistful of bills into his pocket, he hurried back to Monica, hoisting her up by the armpits — still fumbling through her purse — walking her across the damp pavement, practically lifting her into his old blue Toyota, into the getaway car. Let’s see what this baby’ll really do.
He headed toward the camp at Lake Desolation. He’d never thought of it as a hideout before. The shock for him turned into numbness, into tears for her. She sobbed and snuffled, sobbed some more, and he reached across to touch her, to try to offer comfort, her knee, her thigh, her arm, her hand, but she remained stiff and sobbing. “Stop,” he said. “Stop.”
“Okay.” She held her breath for a second, sniffled once, then sobbed again and wailed, “Poor Andrea!”
“She was old,” he said. “Old people die.” Which only brought another anguished sob.
The drizzle was so slight he had to turn off the wipers until the windshield wetted enough for another swipe. Most of the houses they passed on the country road were dark, but for the watchful light on the porch, on the peak of the garage. Guarding against robbers and killers. They passed a modest bungalow with grand, immodest columns of brick guarding the driveway, an iron bird of prey perched atop each. After a few miles, her sobs subsided, settling into the odd snuffle now and then. After a while, she said, “What did you do?”
He looked at her, taking his eyes from the road for a moment. Even in the dim interior, he could see how red her nose was. “When you went back in,” she said.
“Oh. I wanted to make sure she was dead.” That didn’t sound right. “I wanted to make sure we didn’t have to call an ambulance.”
“And she was?”
“Deader’n a doorknob.” That didn’t sound right either.
“Poor Andrea!”
Miles and minutes went by. They passed a cemetery with an iron gate, the kind that usually opened onto a pasture. Out of the numbness in his mind, thoughts began to form, a sculpture taking shape from a block of marble. What did he know about dying? He felt his heart echo, his blood stirring, and he began to suspect, for the first time, that maybe he wasn’t immune to that permanent stillness. Andrea’s blank, dead stare, oblivious to him and the world, the aged flesh of her body spreading, pooling, puddling like the rain outside on the asphalt. He’d seen old, dead relatives before — his grandfather only last year — but they were in caskets where they belonged, manikins instead of who they had been. In tiny Middle Grove, before the church with the red tin steeple, he turned onto Lake Desolation Road. “It must have been a heart attack or something,” he said. “I didn’t see any blood.”
“I think she hit her head on the kitty litter.”
Pails of kitty litter along the aisle. He remembered, near her head. Had one been budged, dented, dinged? For some reason, his numb brain trudged past the pails to images of the old lady suffocating facedown in a box of kitty litter, and to even grosser images, the kitty litter stinking with clumps of cat piss, sandy cat turds, poor Andrea’s face, and to him and his sister, Rosemary, letting Muddy’s box get dirtier and dirtier, arguing over whose turn it was to clean it.
Up the lonely mountain road toward Lake Desolation, barren trees in a blur the color of skeleton bones, the car seemed to move of its own accord, headlights illuminating a deer flashing across from woods to woods like an apparition. Like something he only imagined, seen by someone else. Thoughts and memories and sensations had wrapped him up, lifted him away, carried him off at a distance, and he was only watching the old blue Toyota he was allegedly driving. Her hand hot and real on his thigh was his only anchor, the only thing connecting him, holding him down. When her hand began to move, it was an electric sensation, pulsing, radiating up his thigh, causing a riot in his loins, until it settled, not there, but over the pocket of his jeans. On the lump like a malignant tumor. On the wad of cash.
“What did you do?” she said.
“I can explain that,” he said, but he couldn’t.
She slipped in her hand. “You took the money. From the cash register. Didn’t you?”
He didn’t say anything. He took a deep breath. Maybe he couldn’t explain, but he could come close. He could say they’d spent a fortune there over the years, at overinflated prices, so they were only taking back what was theirs. Only a part of what was theirs. He could say Matson, the owner, was too rich for his own good anyway, driving around in his fancy Lincoln, smoking his fancy cigars. He could say insurance would cover it anyway, that it wasn’t really all that much (he didn’t know how much, but it hadn’t seemed a lot), that it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, unpremeditated, he hadn’t thought it through, and even if he regretted it and changed his mind now, there was nothing they could do. But he didn’t have a chance to say any of those things.
“How much did you get?” Monica said.
He pulled in at the camp, on the rough mud patch where the weeds didn’t grow, illuminating the forlorn place in the headlights among the tall, naked trees. It was his cousin Roger’s place. Roger let him use it in return for keeping it up, though keeping it up amounted to little more than mowing the weeds in summer, trying to keep the mice and other critters out, fixing the odd leak or broken pane every now and then. Camp was a fancy name for two makeshift shacks slapped like mismatched bookends on either side of a small, 1950s-era trailer, a run-down, ramshackle affair — but it had a tiny kitchen, a sofa, a television that got one channel, a bed — a cozy enough hideaway. Or hideout, as the case may be. They counted the money before they got out of the car.
One hundred and forty-seven dollars. Less than he’d expected. He tried not to feel disappointed. It would seem unseemly to wish it were more.
She sighed, shook her head, rested it on his shoulder. The car was still running, the headlights still shining on the camp squatting like a hobo in the dark. She bolted up suddenly, startling him. “What about the camera?”
Like a thousand-volt surge.
The surveillance camera. He hadn’t thought about it, not once. He knew there was one there, up in the corner over the shelf with the hats and caps, he’d seen it there before — but he didn’t think it worked. It didn’t work, did it? Hadn’t Andrea told him once the damn thing was there just for show? “It doesn’t work, does it?”